I myself just (almost) single-handedly finished off a pot of curried pumpkin soup I made the other day. And I did about a dozen different versions of turkey after Thanksgiving--soup, chili, hot turkey sandwiches, turkey croquettes. . .we had a pretty big turkey this year, lots of leftovers!

The Thanksgiving turkey my wife and brother fixed was one of the best I ever had (and I've experienced quite a few Thanksgivings). I'm not sure if brine is a noun or a verb, but my wife brined(?) a turkey overnight, and then my brother brought over his turkey fryer and deep fried the bird. AWESOMELY DELICIOUS!!

The follow-up turkey tortellini soup on Sunday, with fresh baked bread was also quite tasty. I was very thankful.

Pam - my wife makes a different soup every Sunday in the winter. She is now experimenting with Indian food, and have a feeling she would be very interested in your recipe for the curried pumpkin soup.

Tim, I always want to try brining, but when I actually get to roasting the turkey, I forget until it's too late. I've heard that it makes for a really tender turkey.

I'll dig up the curried pumpkin soup recipe. It's really creamy, and has just the right heat to it. Throw on some green onions, or sour cream, or bacon bits (or all three!), add some homebaked bread--heaven!

(sigh) I'm the biggest bore with turkey leftovers, simply because to me just good old cold white meat, lots of salt, topped with homemade whole berry cranberry sauce is as close to heaven as I'll ever get. No recipe needed.

But Pam, yesterday for lunch I had fried lebanon bologna on a toasted hoagie roll with melted swiss. Oh my...getting hungry again!

Lordy! No PBJ trolls here. I wouldn't know how to handle myself if I could stroll by the river and pick some oysters. I was doing well to gather apples for a really fine pie. But oysters? I'm overmatched.

Doc - you're Thanksgiving sounds very romantic in a food sort of way. Something that is so foreign to this region that it should be considered an add to a bucket list. We have something called oysters here in the Rocky Mountains, but they are far from real oysters.

I'm not a so called "tree hugger" but think we here around the chesapeake bay need to do things which could help improve it rather than injure it. One way is for those who live on the water, including me, is to raise oysters in cages off of our docks which will be later harvested and placed in areas of the bay. Amazingly oysters filter literally ###gallons of water each day. The oysters we shucked were grown locally in a nearby river by a aquaculture company. Theres's nothing more tasety/salty than an oyster which was just plucked from the water. Tim by the way we had a tradional turkey for thanksgiving, did the oysters/crab mac & cheese on friday. I quess my motives for helping the bay are related to my love of the bounty we reap from her - crabs, oysters, rockfish, etc. and the desire to continue to enjoy this wealth.

Guess we'd all like to live by the bay and do what it takes to keep the bay alive. Rocky Mountain Oysters aside,(fie TimK)There is nothing quite so fine as fresh picked. That goes for apples, tomatoes, rockfish and catfish and sunfish. And, poor me, clams and oysters.

Doc C gets to pick clams and oysters. I get to pick corn and maters and taters. While I envy his oysters, I do have some advantages.

Somehow we ended up with 3 birds for Thanksgiving and I didn't have to cook any of them! Mom did the traditional oven cooked and my husband deep fried one that was covered in molasses/honey and then smoked a brined one on the grill with mesquite chips. The fried one was the most tender but the smoked one had the best flavor and amazing gravy drippings to go with it.

Last year a friend invited us over to "harvest" our own turkey he had raised. Let's just say I'm a whimp and not the hunting type. I almost passed out actually. It was a lot of work cleaning that bird and getting it ready for the oven. It made me appreciate those from past and present that do it all the time. It was good for my kids to see that things don't just appear on the grocery shelf...they gotta start somewhere!!

The final hurrah for our bird - chopped up carcass in a big pot with veggies, herbs, water - boiled/simmered for 6 hours to make a stock, then used the stock to make beans and rice. A few jalapenos, hot sause, homemade cornbread - PRICELESS.